Dearest Squirrel (Omnibus)

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Dearest Squirrel - the John Osborne Letters (Omnibus)

Drama

Dearest Squirrel

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Dearest Squirrel - the John Osborne Letters (Omnibus)

The extraordinary 30 year love affair between John Osborne and Pamela Lane.

1951: John Osborne met Pamela Lane were soon married - an amazing love affair ensued. Read by Simon Shepherd and Amanda Root.

John Osborne meets Pamela Lane in 1951 and within three months the couple are married. 

So begins an extraordinary love affair that lasts over 30 years.

Peter Whitebrook's completely fresh insight into the mind of one of the UK’s greatest playwrights.

The letters between John Osborne and his first wife, actress Pamela Lane, are also a love letter to a now defunct system of repertory theatre and life in post-war Britain.

As these letters reveal, soon after their divorce, Osborne and Lane began a mutually supportive, loyal, frequently stormy and sometimes sexually intimate alliance lasting thirty years until Osborne’s death. By the mid-1980s, they had become closer and more trusting than they had been since their earliest years together. 

"You are for me what you always were," Pamela told him, "I am in love with you still."

It is, he declared, "my fortune to have loved someone for a lifetime."

Acerbic, witty, candid and heartbreaking, the letters reveal a unique relationship - troubled, tender and enduring.

Author, Peter Whitebrook, was born in London and has written and broadcast extensively on the theatre and literature. His co-adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath won a Fringe First Award. His biography of John Osborne was nominated for both the Sheridan Morley Prize for biography and the Theatre Book Prize.

Omnibus of five parts abridged by Polly Coles.  

Read by Simon Shepherd and Amanda Root.

Producer: Clive Brill

A Brill production for BBC Radio 4, first broadcast in April 2018.

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